The Bitacle Battle of Blogs

UPDATE: Many years have passed since this article was published. Recently, Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today took a look back at the lessons learned from Bitacle and the battle so many bloggers fought against them. Google now works to prevent and stop such abuse. While the Bitacle model still works, because so many spoke out and Jonathan brought legal action against them for misuse of Google Ads, the money trail was stopped and the site closed. Fighting back against comment spam, scrapers, and copyright violators works. It takes time. It takes smart people. It works, if we all fight together. There are so many people and companies still following the Bitacle model, so the fight is not over. Thanks to people like Jonathan, we keep fighting on.

When bitacle.org hit the splogways last year, scrapping content through feeds to fill their “search engine database”, there was a minor flurry over it. Recently, after several top notch and big mouth bloggers discovered they were still at it, grabbing full content feeds from blogs and sticking ads into the content — trust me, hell hath no fury greater than a ripped off blogger.

When the crap hit the fan at the end of last week over bitacle’s continued content theft, I watched with a thrill as the blogosphere did what it does best. Instead of just sniping, the bloggers of the world united in an amazing sense of community and struck back with force.

Bitacle has become Public Enemy #1 this weekend in some parts of the blogosphere (Search Bitacle on Technorati for more details). As I reported earlier, the Spain-based splogger scrapes your content (your Creative Commons deed be damned), monetizes it, keeps the cash — and refuses to answer email complaints. I called them “thieves” in my first post, and I am repeating the charge here. Bitacle’s boss, the magnificently misnamed Jesus Angelo “But call me Ladrón, honey” Glez, is a thief.

…Bitacle, while not replying to anyone’s mails, as far as I can see, seems to be aware they are under attack. They’ve been down much of the weekend, and they have (today) started including the URL to the content they steal. Nevertheless, they are still ripping off and re-purposing content, without permission, for their own financial gain. Worse, they still encourage comments to the stolen blog posts on their site in an attempt to dupe readers into believing they are seeing a “real” blog.

Larry Borsato exposed some (since defunct) scammers last year. RSS-feeds are publications, just like the magazine that comes through your door each month. See Myth #1.

SillyBilly #1: Publishing RSS feeds is like leaving your bike at the end of your driveway: You are asking for it to be stolen.

No, publishing RSS feeds is like publishing a book, or a magazine article, or making a radio show. Just as I don’t expect my magazine articles to be ripped off and republished — without attribution and without pay — I don’t expect my feed to be scraped. Theft is theft.

Putting a Stop to Bitacle’s Scrapping of Blog Content

*UPDATE*:Plagiarism Today – Bitacle: A Plan for Action is a great step-by-step action plan for responding and fighting back against bitacle. Since bitacle is based in Spain, they have also provided a Spanish translation of the DMCA form letter to send to them in their own language.

One of our WordPress.com own has set up stopbitacleorg.wordpress.com with news and information on the latest battle against bitacle. They’ve even come up with some buttons to help warn others.

Another interesting angle on this is that all the ripped off bloggers who are blogging about this are seeing their posts appear in bitacle condemning the copyright violations and content theft and abuse by bitacle. That is getting right in the face of bitacle users.

There is a discussion about this issue on the WordPress.com forum that I encourage everyone to check in with to see what is going on to stop WordPress.com blogs from being ripped off by bitacle and other sploggers. Lend your voice to the WordPress.com complaints, too.*UPDATE*: Voices have been heard. Thank you. WordPress.com has been working on putting a stop to bitacle, but it seems that bitacle figured out how to get past the first blockers. The awesome folks behind the scenes of WordPress.com are watching and changing tactics when bitacle changes theirs, keeping WordPress.com as safe as they can for us humble users. Thanks, WordPress.com!

Unfortunately, this only adds to the evidence piling up that bitacle is determined to grab content without permission any way they can.

To try to get around the issue of copyright infringement, over the weekend, bitacle added “Articles are copyrighted by their respective authors” to their templates. Sorry, folks, this doesn’t work.

You put ads on full post contents with copyrights that clearly state “no commercial use, you are violating the copyright. White washing it with a copyright statement that they may think acts like a “hold harmless claim” only proves how stupid they are. Both the statement and the usage of the content violates copyrights, so who is fooling who. Don’t let it fool you.

To find out if your site has been ripped by bitacle, you could go to the front site of en.bitacle.org and chase your tail. It can be a long chase. I recommend you go to the search results in the Aggregates section for this blog and enter in your own search. Use the name or most popular keywords used on your blog to see if your blog is listed. Odd thing is that “Lorelle WordPress” turns up this blog, but “Lorelle on WordPress” returns a “not found”. So you might have to dig to find if your blog is there.

Once you’ve found your blog, click on the link and you will see the most recent post or more in the content area, with ads in and around the content. In the left sidebar, you will see a running column of all the post titles from your blog, from the most recent to the oldest they have scrapped. They have Digg buttons so you can dig your own post from their site – leading more users to read your content on bitacle instead of your own site. Below your post, there is a comment box, so people can ask questions and comment on your article even though you aren’t there to monitor the comments, lending even more visible evidence that they are using your content as theirs. Screams splog, doesn’t it?

If you are among those with content under abuse on bitacle, go to Stopbitacleorg and follow one or more of the instructions there to officially complain, which usually involves an email. The more voices, the better.

* UPDATE *

It’s September 9, 2006, and I just checked to see if bitacle had grabbed any more of my site’s content, and they haven’t. But they also haven’t removed the old posts. The comments were closed, though one person did get in a “thieves” comment before they were shut off. Good for them.

I also noticed something that really pisses me off. At the bottom of the page is a series of numbers. Click those numbers and you go back in time to other posts they’ve grabbed the content from via the feeds. The number also tells you how many posts they have of yours. Mine numbered 687. I have a lovely word for these folks that begins with an “F”. Want to guess what it is? ;-)

The Voice of the Blogosphere Speaks Loudly

The most exciting thing about the bitacle debacle is how the blogging community, representing millions of people blogging on thousands of different topics, have come together to do battle with bitacle. For the most part, bloggers have been working together to use their voices and creative energies to speak out and write WordPress Plugins and instructions on how to stop bitacle from ripping you off.

As blogs are specifically targeted, the blogging community spread the word and the word brought energy, enthusiasm, and a commitment to fight back against those who abuse our blogs. As Allan Jenkins so beautifully put it:

Can anyone explain to me why blogger content is supposedly “fair game,” while no one would dream of scraping the London Times, the Wall Street Journal and CNN and trying to repackage it as their own? I thought not. But, the fact is, Allan Jenkins has just as much right to control his content as the New York Times does theirs.

* UPDATE *

As part of the tremendous blogosphere response of bloggers to these sploggers, there are new tools you should serious consider adding to your arsenal to fight off those who steal your content.

25 Comments

Their use of public Flickr photos also bothers me. Flickr does allow developers to use their API in order to display photos from their public database. However, Bitacle’s thing with requesting comments to people’s content within their site, “digg it”, the “Add this photo my my starting page” functionality, etc, all bother me, as it makes it so easy for average users not to realize that the photos belong to somebody else and although allowed for public view, they are copyrighted material.

Flickr provides an API opt-out option to users (Log in your Flickr account and go to “Your Account”, and then to “API Opt-Out”) I *hope* that this stops splogs from displaying my photos, but I’m not sure if it does completely. Flickr does publish feeds for photos, so those could be grabbed anyway. In fact, I’m even afraid of looking for my own stuff in splogs like Bitacle fearing that my search may trigger an automatic crawl. Bastards!

glenn reynolds said the other day that each blogger creates his own newspaper everyday. ummm not quite. bloggers don’t create much content, they mostly link to other people’s content, mostly msm content. so when instpundit profits, is that because he ‘generated’ his own content? the line isn’t as bright as you would hope.

Thanks for your kind words, Lorelle. What I like about the StopBitacle movement is that it demonstrates how disparate bloggers/podcasters, who don’t know one another, can so quickly band together to get something done.

Now, we may not succeed in this case. But a successful case, one that I use in my seminars, is the SEA-EAT blog and wiki. This blog, aimed at addressing the aftermath of the Christmas 2004 earthquake and tsunami, was created on the fly by 7 bloggers who had never met one another, BEFORE the tsunami got to Africa. A week later, it was pulling down a million hits a day and was (and is) the best source for information about what was happening on the ground.

The ability of the blogosphere to see an issue, swarm on it, organize, and quickly bring pressure to bear is one of its most interesting and — to me — attractive attributes.

Since this is a WordPress.com blog, WordPress Plugins aren’t available to us here.

Also, a note to all that WordPress.com implemented some anti-bitacle efforts over the weekend and it seems bitacle found a way around them. They are working on other methods. So patience and time will tell what will really work and won’t.

Perhaps the way to stop Bitacle in their tracks is for another aspect to be added to the stop Bitacle campaign. Many notable bloggers such as Robert Scoble (over 700 posts!) have had hundreds of their posts scraped for the purpose of Bitacle raking in Adsense profit. So perhaps the place for the blogging community to take focused action is on their bank account. As well as opting out, complaining and taking legal action some bloggers have suggested that demands should be made for Bitacle to turn over the appropriate percentage of profits they gained to the bloggers they ripped off. Here’s an example of a blogger who takes that point of view http://www.kbcafe.com/spam/?guid=20060927070530

The best approach for handling Bitacle, at this time, seems to be sending DMCA notices both to the search engines and to Google Adsense, the provider of their ads. By cutting off the search engine benefit and undercutting the ad revenue, we might be able to force them to change their ways.

I seriously doubt though that this company will be viable long term. You can’t make this many people mad and earn this kind of reputation and survive for long. Sploggers depend upon flying underneath the radar. They have some protections due to their location, but they are still vulnerable.

I have taken measures to block them from my site and I have been monitoring my site and seeing if they have been around. So far I haven’t found anything. And I hope I never do. I’m thinking about taking everything related to my son off my site. It’s sick what they’re doing. And it’s not fair.

Thanks for posting this! To my dismay, bitacle is stealing my content as well, even though my feed contains only excerpts. I wouldn’t have done about it if I hadn’t read it here. Keep up the good work, Lorelle!

RSS is still a Good Thing, and face it, these spammers could just scrape sites (which is what they did before) instead of stealing feeds. I really like that plugin you posted which changes content for different bots. :)

One technique I use is that I *always* refer to other posts in everything I write so even without the plug-in everything they steal becomes an advertisement for my site.

Damn. I just found out about this yesterday on Blog Antagonist’s blog, and today, using the Aggregates link you provide, found out that my measley little nowhere blog (that *I* don’t even make money from!!) was ripped off in whole – at least when it was still a Blogger blog. Nothing, it appears, from after I moved over to WordPress, thank goodness. In a classic “locking the barn door after the horse gets out” move, I deleted that Blogger blog. All the content had been migrated to WordPress anyway. Of course that has no effect on the fact the content now lives on bitacle.org. Damn damn damn!!!

No more time now, but I’m saving all these great links, have downloaded the DMCA notice from http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/ – lots of great info there! – and will gird my loins tomorrow to add my tiny voice to all the others.

I did indeed find nearly all of my posts from mimiwrites.blogspot.com under the Aggregates tab on Bitacle.org. I’ve alerted my blogger buddies and I’m sure there will be quite a discussion this weekend. You’re right; the “All articles copyrighted by their respective authors” doesn’t cut it. The names of the authors – the real bloggers – are nowhere to be seen.
How many readers have I lost because of these jokers?
There is no way to leave a comment on their site now either. It is shameful. We are all creatively working in the blogosphere to bring about intelligent discussion around the globe on many issues. And our work – long hours of writing and researching and contemplating – is being ripped off by these people? I think not.
I would like to link this article in a post I’m working on for tomorrow on this issue. Do I have your permission to link this post on Mimi Writes?

Thanks. Stealing content to abuse as yours is one thing. Linking and fair use is another. That is totally permissible under copyright law. Thank you for spreading the word. It will take all of us working together to put a stop to ALL CONTENT THEFT, not just Bitacle. Those folks in Spain are just the tip of the ice berg.

Your content is yours. Make sure you treat it well and protect it by fighting for its rights.

I don’t understand. Bitacle seems to be a search engine. When I look at it I see a three step process 1. find a headline of interest 2. go to a brief summary 3. go to the original article on the original site. Am I missing something? I don’t want my content stolen but I don’t mind it being summarised and then Bitacle readers being directed to my site. What am I missing???

Can you explain to me how Bitacle, who you now claim as public enemy number one, is any different than Icerocket, Technorati, or Google? I mean all these companies scrape your sites and then monetize it without giving you part of the profits. The only difference is that you see these others as getting you traffic, so does Bitacle somehow get you less traffic? Explain how them exposing your work to more people gets you less traffic?

Or is it that you only want traffic that is expressly paid for through advertisement, and not through crawling your sites and republishing, in part or in whole, your RSS feeds? If this is the case have you contacted these other companies and requested that they as well stop scraping your content and RSS feeds while using it for their monetary gains?

The net is a big place and only getting bigger. There are those that produce content, and those that help spread content to the masses. We are lucky that the business model is not moving towards strictly paid advertisement and paid directories. This would add even more corporatism the net and keep little individual publishers from being able to compete. I am sure the majority will not see this, they fall into the “mine mine mine” state of mind and never realize that what they are asking for is to take their toys and go home.

Really if you believe that your words are owned by you and usable only under your terms and conditions, then password protect your sites and require any readers or feed users to be accepted and OK’d by you. Simple enough.

Since 2007 i discovered they shotle my blog contents and i tried contact and they ignored me. When i and friends that read my blog wrote some bad for them they deleted ours comment to nobody see, but i left in my page in red warning people that bitacle was using my pages without autorizations, i put to appear as 2009 for be in first place when someone open my blog. That time also google stoped to give me reclaims in my pages but they were geting advertsiment in the pages they put my blog,I found it so terrible, they gained money using my blog and i couldnt get. Until nowadays google doesnt give me ad bec they said i was clicking my advertsiments, i done another blog to get adv. and also bec i didnt want more post in a blog that thers was geting money with my contents without pay me anything.Im really very happy when i sow others persons discovered how shit they are and now i see the justice came late but is happening ..thanks God…they paied the bad they done to me and others maany people more.
Fri

40 Trackbacks/Pingbacks

[…] After reading Lorelle’s post I’ve found that there are actually a lot of folks who are mad at Bitacle. But this is exactly why I decided to copyright my content. If you’re using a CC license that does not include the “non-commercial” stipulation then you have no leg to stand on in a situation like this. At least, that’s how I understand it. I may be wrong and if I am I’ll admit it but from the way I understand CC, what Bitacle is doing is perfectly legal. It’s unethical, but not illegal. If you can convince me otherwise then more power to ya. I’d actually like to be wrong. That way there are more people who can step up to slit Bitacle’s throat. […]

[…] In a week or more, check in with the Digital Fingerprint panel to see if your post content shows up where it shouldn’t be. If you find a bunch of unrelated posts showing up with your “unique” phrase, it’s obviously not unique enough. You may be lucky and never see your writing illegally published, but with the recent scam of bitacle.org, the likelihood of your blog’s content getting scrapped through its feeds increases. […]

[…] The IntarWub’s still buzzing about the bitacle thing and there’s quite some useful stuff on how to do something about sploggers to be found. Also, check out Lorelle’s take on the subject. Here’s a message from the true warriors against bitacle: In the meantime, I’m changing my feeds to summary excerpts, sorry about that.. And: los gente de bitacle son ijos de puta (I like to say these things in a language that people understand ) These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. […]

[…] Lorelle on WordPress in “The Bitacle Battle of Blogs” writes: To try to get around the issue of copyright infringement, over the weekend, bitacle added “Articles are copyrighted by their respective authors” to their templates. Sorry, folks, this doesn’t work. […]

[…] When a splog (spam blog) grabs the feeds from your blog and uses it as it’s own content, it is called scrapping. Different blogs have different copyright policies. Use of full content feeds on sites with advertising or considered “commercial”, even with links back to the original site, is often a violation of the most common blog copyright policies. Putting a stop to these content thieves can be difficult, as seen recently with the Bitacle Battle. […]

[…] If you thought it was only ever the uber-popular kids on the block that have content scraped, without permission and then used to make money without the blog author’s knowledge – you would be wrong. […]

[…] While many of us blogging bloggers have been doing battle against splogs and content thieves, Inside Google reminds us that blog feeds aren’t the only feeds out there being used and abused: Okay, this should be a no-brainer, but just because Gmail offers RSS feeds doesn’t mean you should offer them to the public. A number of people have done just that, sending their Gmail off to Feedburner and then subscribing in Bloglines, which puts it in the public directory (unless you actually thought to make it private). […]

[…] As any blogger knows, spammers are quite happy to post to your blog to generate extra income for themselves. They care little whether your blog is something you do when you have nothing better to do, or whether it’s a labour of love with a large audience. All they want to do is to make money with the minimum of effort. Anti-spam measures like Bad Behaviour or Akismet or similar can help with the fight against that. Another way they make their money is to scrape your RSS feed. I won’t explain this in detail because it’s explained much better on Lorelle’s article. Definitely worth a read. […]

[…] Due to a recent rash of splogs, spam blogs which specialize in stealing feed content, called scraping, and representing it as their sole content, WordPress Plugin authors and artists have jumped into the fight to help protect WordPress blogs. […]

[…] Well that’s part one, Splog defined. Now on to the next part. What should we do to stop or prevent this? Well, I found out about a plugin called AntiLeech by Owen Winkler (http://asymptomatic.org) which can be found at RedAlt. If you are interested to know about the Bitacle.org splogger website and what they have done to the blogging community, blogger Laurelle has written an interesting article highlighting the wrongs done to us. This is what she had to say in the article: When bitacle.org hit the splogways last year, scrapping content through feeds to fill their “search engine database”, there was a minor flurry over it. Recently, after several top notch and big mouth bloggers discovered they were still at it, grabbing full content feeds from blogs and sticking ads into the content — trust me, hell hath no fury greater than a ripped off blogger. […]

[…] During the recent Bitacle Battle of Blogs, the Stopbitacle.org was started and Stop Bitacle buttons showed up on blogs all over the web. Unfortunately, stopping bitacle, a splog that scrapes your blog’s feed content without permission, is just the top of the splog ice berg. […]

[…] I’ve spent a bit of time reading about this blog content stealing issue apparently going on. As Lorelle says on her blog: “hell hath no fury greater than a ripped off blogger.” Interesting, isn’t it? […]

[…] For those determined to remind the world that their blog content is theirs and not available for the taking or stealing, check out the variety of buttons and badges to Stop Content Theft. Spam Blogs, known as splogs, are grabbing content from your blog feeds and using it as their own on blogs, aggregators, and “search services” surrounded with advertising, comments, social bookmarking service submit links, and making your content earn money for them without your permission and in violation of most copyrights. Spread the word to protect your blog’s content, and encourage people to ask first if they want to use it. […]

[…] Many fine bloggers are writing all about it this morning. Here are some lovely links to get your blood pressure thrumming in your ears. Because like I said, you are probably over there too, being ripped off. I suggest reading some of the links before running right over to bitacle.org and looking for yourself, as you will want to spend as little time flipping through that ass cavity of a web site as you can so as to minimize their profits. Profits they are making on stolen blog entries. Did I mention that? […]

[…] I first heard about the whole sordid mess from Ann last week. But when I took her advice and went here to see if I was a victim, I didn’t turn up. I figured since I used the aggregate search and none of my key words–fuctard, Diva Girl, and Zen Baby, in case you were wondering– popped up, I wasn’t affected. […]

[…] I’ve truncated my blog feeds. Just in case you were wondering. You probably weren’t. It’s related to the Bitacle saga, reading about which has taken up too much of my evening. I have yet to make further moves to block Bitacle from my content, but I’m too tired to think about it right now. […]

[…] There are some things you can do to protect your content (lots of details here and here and here). One of the major things you can do is set your blog to only send a few lines of your content in your feed. Have you noticed that you can only read a line or two of my posts in bloglines? In WordPress, that’s controlled under Options -> Reading -> Syndication Feeds – set to Summary. This actually appears to be effective, since the main feeds of my new blog are not appearing in bitacle. They were getting the Comments feed, which I have disabled. […]

I was recently reading a post at Lorrelle on WordPress about Bitacle and their content stealing.
Many sploggers believe that if content is on a site, it is fair game and not copyrighted. Some are a little better, but think that if you have a feed, cont…

[…] own website, fill it with ads, and profit at your expense. This is unethical and illegal, but it happens. While I don’t necessarily object to republishing of my articles, I want it done on my terms […]

[…] that WordPress.com blogs have been the target of scrapers. Last year, many of us fought against the giant blog scraper and splog, Bitacle, which continues to scrap WordPress and WordPress.com blogs, unfortunately. Still, a united voice […]

[…] Did you know that someone is making money off of your blog without your permission? I’ve been doing my own research on this, and I’m really upset about it. I’ll refer you to Moof’s description of the situation (Part 1 – especially the comments, Part 2, Part 3), as she is the first I heard about this. Mimi also has a descrpition on her blog. I also refer you to Lorelle. […]